


first, do no harm (whatever it is that 'harm' means)

by crownsandbirds



Category: Fruits Basket, Fruits Basket (Anime 2019)
Genre: Character Study, Doctor/Patient, Emotional Manipulation, Medical Procedures, Mild Blood, No Romance, Other, Past Violence, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 12:37:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20227984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownsandbirds/pseuds/crownsandbirds
Summary: "So, Hatori allows himself to be taken care of, grits his teeth and deals with the pain in his eye. When he arrives home, Akito is awake and waiting for him in his office, his eyes hazy and glazed over and a huge glass shard stuck in the bottom of his foot."Hatori's medical practice in the Soma family.





	first, do no harm (whatever it is that 'harm' means)

**Author's Note:**

> Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all medical students are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good."

Medical school taught Hatori many things. 

Anatomy and physiology and biochemistry and the theoretical information in heavy books, he studied during his university years; but the way to handle a sick person, the way his fingers should skim over feverish skin and press a needle in the crook of someone's arm, the questions he should ask and the proper manner with which to ask them, he would only learn by having his own patients, by setting up his clinic and doing his work. Some things you can only learn with time, and patience, and practice; how he should carry himself as a doctor, the weight of the stethoscope around his neck, the fastest way of putting on gloves for surgeries, how to make clean stitches to close up open, bleeding wounds. He learned each patient is different, and so he must adapt himself to them in order to exercise the best medicine he can. As cold as the blood runs in his arteries, as icy as the chambers of his heart are, he wears his white coat with pride, with the honor that only comes with something he worked impossibly hard to achieve, and he takes his duty as a doctor with as much seriousness as he can. 

But still, medical school taught him things. Taught him about death, mostly, and life. Taught him about pain, about humanity. About a thousand different ways of harming people, and a thousand different ways of healing them. 

And in between tests and hospitals and clumsy attempts to learn how to put on an IV tube without injuring someone, six years went by, and he sums up all the knowledge he acquired in one sentence: some people are born to inflict pain. And some people are born to try and soothe that pain. 

As he watches Akito gracefully put on his robes, his elegant fingers tracing over the seams of his clothing, he pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, takes his stethoscope off and places it on top of his desk, and decides he was right. 

-

There's something comforting in listening to someone's breathing. 

He was taught the proper technique for searching for respiratory issues during his first year of medical school, and again with more depth during his fourth - but it's something else when it's like this. When it's Yuki sitting on the stretcher, half-naked with his robes pooling on top of his lap, his back turned to Hatori, his delicate features framed by the sunset streaming in through the window. 

Hatori grabs the stethoscope, runs through the motions made natural by now. Puts on the eartips, checks if they're in the right position, takes hold of the stem, presses his finger to the bell and the cold surface of the diaphragm to Yuki's back, just over the ribs almost visible through his milky-white skin. 

"Breathe," he says, softly, but he can't listen to his own voice - like this, Yuki's heartbeat and the soothing, rhythmic depth of his breathing take over his entire hearing, filling up his mind. 

Back when he was a student, one of his teachers said that examining someone's breathing was like hearing the ocean. He finds himself staring at the soft silver hair on the back of Yuki’s neck, but he’s not seeing - he’s hearing the ocean of his respiration, the slight stutter-stop and the hiss in the corner of the sound that tells him something is wrong. Has been wrong.

He slides the diaphragm to a different spot, closer to his heart. “Breathe, please,” he instructs again. 

Yuki does, deeply. Hatori focuses to listen. He knows what he's looking for, the same thing he's heard and saw and diagnosed multiple times before, knows precisely how Yuki's bronchi don't work, knows what pain and discomfort look like in his pretty face, how they drag a frown between his eyebrows and grit his teeth together. He's taken Yuki in his arms, placed him on a bed, watched over him as he suffocated in his own lack of oxygen, held his shaking hand and shushed him until he fell asleep. 

When his crisis don't take over him (and something else Hatori has learned, the ability pain and illness have of making tangible vulnerability out of the coldest characters), Yuki is a silent patient, obedient and composed. Hatori has never seen him complain, or even so much as felt him flinch away from a needle or an IV. Even when his face is pale with pain, his forehead damp with cold sweat, he presses his lips together and handles it beautifully. Hatori can’t see his eyes, but he can imagine them - big and cold and gorgeous staring out of the window with all the grace of a prince. 

"Once more, please," he breathes out. Yuki breathes in. 

-

The first time he gauged Akito's blood pressure, he thought he'd done it incorrectly. 

Gauging someone's blood pressure requires a lot of practice for it to become something easily performed; handling the sphygmomanometer and interpreting its results is tricky at best, and difficult at worst, and figuring out how to insufflate the rubber cuff without making the patient uncomfortable while at the same time making it tight enough to allow the monitor to do its job is something you can only learn after fucking up a handful of times. Loosening and tightening the valve while pressing at the bulb demands a level of mechanical skill that can only be developed after a great deal of clumsiness. Other than the device itself, finding the person's artery on the crook of their elbow through nothing but touch and educated guesses alone takes a lot longer than most people would think, and locating someone's pulse in their wrist can come either immediately or after long, annoying moments of prodding around. 

Hatori fucked up a lot as a student, and then less during internships, and when he reached his surgery residency he had gone through enough practice that it became second nature to him. 

So, when he gauged Akito's blood pressure for the first time, and saw the results pointed out as 90/70, his heartbeat picked up immediately with the certainty that he'd made a mistake. 

He brought the display closer, squinted at the numbers. 

"What's wrong?" Akito asked, his pretty, sweet voice unable to hide his morbid curiosity. 

Hatori shook his head, because he wasn't in the presence of someone in front of whom he could demonstrate any sort of hesitation, but mentally he went through all the steps to performing a blood pressure check-up, akin to a nervous student doing the process for the first time. "Nothing. Allow me to do it again." 

Akito shrugged gracefully, the collar of his robes falling to reveal the sinuous curve between his long neck and his thin, pale shoulder. "Sure."

Hatori did it again, slower this time, more careful - and there it was, clear as the glint of the sunlight grazing off the metal of the display, 90/70. 

"Did you eat this morning?" he asked as he released the cuff from around Akito's arm. His skin was slightly red, rubbed raw by the tight hold of the velcro on the delicate tissue. Hatori caught himself staring at the small indentations. 

"I did," Akito answered. 

"Did you sleep well? Are you feeling ill in any way?"

Akito shook his head once, his hair falling on top of his eyes. 

"Well," Hatori sighed, moved the monitor away, decided to reach the only plausible conclusion. "You must have chronically low blood pressure. Just to be sure, I'll come over to check once more later today and tomorrow."

Akito moves his robes back to cover his body nearly as an afterthought. His fingers were so thin, Hatori noticed. "What does that mean?"

"It means that you probably faint more often than most people. Also means that you're physically weaker. Other than that, you should be fine. But considering your other health issues, I have to keep track of that."

Akito's dark eyes glinted sickly. "Oh."

-

After Hatori nearly lost sight in one of his eyes, went to the hospital himself, dealt with the painful humiliation of being a patient for one of his old medical school classmates turned ophthalmologist, got a bunch of bandages and painkillers and too many recommendations to take care of himself and avoid any more strain, he went back home to take care of Akito. 

_ I'm the family doctor _ , he thought as he shrugged on his white coat.  _ I take care of the family.  _

True to his diagnosis all those years ago, when compared to normal people Akito had a slightly increased tendency of passing out when subjected to stress - and a pathologically high tendency of driving himself beyond the boundaries of clinically psychotic. So after ripping out half of Kana's hair with the furious grip of his fist and smashing Hatori's face against a mirror, he'd collapsed in Shigure's arms and remained unconscious for the rest of the night and the better part of the following day. 

Normally, Hatori would've worried, as any doctor worthy of their name would worry over a patient they spend so much time on - but he'd just nearly lost an eye, and completely lost his fiancee, and he attributed Akito's continued state of unconsciousness to the way he'd most likely exhausted himself and his frail body out after his insanely violent manic outburst. 

So, Hatori allows himself to be taken care of, grits his teeth and deals with the pain in his eye. When he arrives home, Akito is awake and waiting for him in his office, his eyes hazy and glazed over and a huge glass shard stuck in the bottom of his foot.

"What the hell is that?" Hatori asks, kneeling beside the bed immediately and taking Akito's thin ankle in his hands to analyze the extent of the damage. The shard is huge, and at least a third of it has carved a path for itself inside Akito's body - the graceful bottom arch of his foot is covered in dried blood and smaller pieces of glass from the broken mirror. The idea of someone having to spend an extended amount of time with this type of wound and absolutely no care at all, not even the minimum required to take off the glass and bandage it up, drives him mad with outrage. " _ Why did no one take this off _ ?"

Akito shrugs. "I didn't let them." He looks unaffected, as usual, his expression serene and beautiful - a complete paradox to the gnarling viciousness of his gritted teeth and murderous eyes that Hatori witnessed before. Still, as composed and princely as he looks, his robes pristine and his hair damp from his morning bath, his hands twitch in a sick afterthought of movement, as if his fingers are  _ searching _ for something to destroy, as if his very body is yearning for anything it can shatter to pieces. Hatori sees in the way his fingers shake in random spasms the same manic cruelty that smashed his cheek against glass with enough force to break. 

His eye throbs painfully under the bandages.

Hatori twists Akito's foot to one side and the other, gauges the depth of the cut. "How long has this been here?"

"Not long," Akito answers. His toes flex, his ankle shifts in Hatori's careful hold. "I went back to that room after I woke up, and I stepped on the shards."

"Okay," Hatori takes a deep breath, releases him, gets up with some difficulty to grab the tweezers, the bandages, the antiseptic, a clean towel, a needle and the black threads he uses for stitches. "Okay. And you didn't let anyone at least take the glass off before I arrived?"

Akito tilts his head to the side in an angle that goes sharp enough as to be unsettling, as if the very concept of allowing something like that is absolutely incomprehensible. "No. It has to be you." 

He bites the words off as if they're clots of coagulated blood trapped on the tip of his tongue. He keeps his head tilted like a bird that had its neck snapped in half. His eyes are huge like this, dark like black-holes. 

Hatori doesn't try to make sense out of that. The rational part of him, the one that was raised in 6 years of med school and 5 years of surgery residency, wants to snap at Akito to be less of a petulant child, wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him and tell him,  _ you could've gotten an infection, you ridiculous spoiled brat, this isn't safe, this isn't sanitary _ . The other part of him, the Soma part of him, the part hidden under the bandages wrapped around half of his head, is relieved. 

_ Yes _ , he thinks. He's the family doctor. He's the one to schedule monthly examinations with Yuki to check the state of his respiratory issues. He's the one who patches up whoever gets caught in the fairly extensive radius of Akito's collateral damage, he's the one who performs surgeries and cleans up wounds and prescribes painkillers and medication. He's the one to keep track of Akito's chronically low blood pressure and his asthma medication and his anemia and his polycystic ovaries and his hormone replacement therapy.

He's Akito's doctor. 

He sits down on the bed, motions for Akito to lay down and put his injured foot on top of the clean towel he placed upon his lap. 

"This may hurt," he warns, because he doesn't blame Akito for his eye, or for Kana, or for the shattered mirror or the spilled blood. But he couldn't bring himself to perform the movements to grab the anesthesia.

Akito hums in understanding and relaxes back against the pillows. His glossy black hair spills around his beautiful face, and he regards Hatori with a carefully attentive look in his eyes. After a beat, he pushes himself up and traces the edges of the bandage with the tip of his finger. 

"Does it hurt?" he asks, his voice melting around the corners with morbid curiosity, as if he's proud of himself.

"It does."

Akito hums again. 

As Hatori cleans up the arch of his foot, he wonders if some of the blood there is his own. 

**Author's Note:**

> here it is, the final byproduct of my first year of med school. yay, go me. only five more years to go. forgive any mischaracterizations, i'm not all caught up in fruits basket yet.


End file.
